Exhibition - Lee Miller in Colour, Farleys Gallery, ENGLAND

The Lee Miller Archives are proud to present the first exhibition dedicated to Lee Miller’s colour photography.

An icon of 20th century photography, Lee Miller is renowned for her striking black and white surrealist imagery and fearless war reportage. Now for the first time, through this exhibition, her colour photographs show her extraordinary mastery of colour. For most of the images this exhibition is their debut appearance as they have never been seen before outside of the Lee Miller Archives.

The exhibition features her use of the Tri-Carbro process in her New York studio in 1933 before colour film was available. She endured many hours completing the slow and complex process necessary to create the perfect tricolour.As a surrealist in Paris, drawing on her experience from working with Man Ray and Edward Steichen she grew to value technical innovation as a way to capture the dreamlike images of the marvellous that form much of her surrealist work. Later she seized on the newly invented colour reversal film to capture scenes from her life in Egypt. As one of the major photographers contributing to British Vogue during the Second World War, Lee Miller had access to large format colour film and her heavily saturated fashion shots often graced the magazine’s front cover. Later, keeping abreast of the curve, she used colour reversal to capture the likeness of some of the greatest modern artists such as; Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, and Wilfredo Lam.

The Lee Miller Archives, based at Farleys House & Gallery has over 60,000 negatives in the collection, in addition to colour transparencies. Until recently the colour images were almost completely unseen due to the risk of printing from such fragile original images. Now digital scanning technology allow us to preserve them for generations to come.This exhibition also includes works by Roland Penrose, the British surrealist artist who Miller married in 1947 and David E. Scherman, LIFE Magazine combat photographer and Miller’s wartime buddy. They capture Miller in holiday snapshots, surreal compositions, and even for demonstrations in camouflage with her skills as a fashion model in her earlier career often evident in her pose.